Modern American Literature and Contemporary Iranian Cinema: Identity, Appropriation, Recontextualization in Bloomington, MN

As an endeavor to contribute to the burgeoning field of comparative literature, this monograph addresses the dynamic yet understudied "intertextual dialogism" between modern American literature and contemporary Iranian Cinema, pinpointing how the latter appropriates and recontextualizes instances of the former to construct and inculcate vestiges of national/gender identity on the silver screen. Drawing on Louis Montrose’s catchphrase that Cultural Materialism foregrounds "the textuality of history, [and] the historicity of texts", this book contends that literary "texts" are synchronic artifacts prone to myriad intertextual and extra-textual readings and understandings, each historically conditioned. The recontextualization of
Herzog
,
Franny and Zooey
The Glass Menagerie
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and
Death of a Salesman
into contemporary Iran provides an intertextual avenue to delineate the textuality of history and the historicity of texts